Apples Never Fall

The novel explores the cost of sacrifice—and how sacrifices are often entirely overlooked by those for whom they’re made. In the novel, parents sacrifice for their children; lovers sacrifice for their lovers; grown children sacrifice for their parents—such self-denial for the benefit of others creates not gratitude but rather deep-seated regrets and grudges that simmer, sometimes for decades. Healing begins only when regrets are reframed for what they are: expressions of authentic love.

At the pitch of their showdown on Christmas morning, Joy unleashes what she kept inside for more than 40 years: “What about me? What about my career? My sacrifice?” (383). Before that dramatic showdown moment, Stan never suspects Joy’s sacrifice. At the cruel heart of Stan’s emotional indifference to his wife is his assumption that she never sacrificed anything for their marriage, for their family, for their work—but as Joy finally points out, she was the better player, the more aggressive and attuned coach. She gave all that up for her family, for a decidedly unglamorous life attending to the business of a distracted husband and four self-centered children. In turn, each of the grown Delaney children reveals the sacrifices they made to try to live up to Stan’s expectations, the childhood they never enjoyed, the friendships they never had—all to commit to their father’s sense of disciplined training. Savannah herself is aware of the sacrifices she was compelled to make to try to satisfy her mother’s dream of reconstructing her into a world-class ballet dancer, starving herself to make that dream a reality.

The novel doesn’t dismiss the heroism of such quiet sacrifice—and indeed argues that those who demand it (most notably Stan and Savannah’s mother) operate from a genuine, if twisted, sense of devotion and love. The children happily committed to their father’s dream of their athletic success, knowing in their hearts that such a dream was unlikely or impossible. As Joy thinks that Christmas morning, she doesn’t seek gratitude or even thanks for her sacrifice but rather the acknowledgement that abandoning some critical element of her own life had value, had meaning. In directing Harry Haddad to a different teacher, in effect destroying Stan’s dream of coaching a world-class tennis champion, Joy tries to give Stan the opportunity to tap into the difficult reward of sacrifice, to step away from a dream and accept the smaller rewards of family, marriage, and home.

The “murder” of Joy Delaney is revealed to be little more than a set of coincidences and misunderstandings—at the center of which is the most improbable and hilarious explanation: The dog ate her note. One by one, the emotionally wounded misfits of the Delaney family struggle to reclaim love and recommit to the work of relationships. In this context, Savannah Pagonis is a striking exception. In her calculating ego, her sociopathic way with elaborate lies, her mercenary sense of using people for financial gain, her unapologetic sense of reducing other people to objects, Savannah serves as the novel’s exception to the otherwise uplifting ending. As the Delaneys move toward reestablishing their invigorating relationships by accepting responsibility for the havoc of their emotional lives, Savannah flies home to see whether she successfully killed her mother by starving her to death.

In Savannah, the novel argues the toxic logic of blame. For each character, life turns in unexpected ways. Decisions made with the best intentions turn out bad. People reveal unsuspected character flaws. Events refuse to conform to the best-laid plans or the best intentions. Each Delaney comes to terms with that reality. Against this moral drama is Savannah’s bitter refusal to relinquish the comforting logic of blame. She holds her mother accountable for her life of joys denied—although the mother was motivated by a maternal desire to see her daughter as a world-class dancer. Savannah blames her brother, whose only character flaw was to be born endowed with the agility and coordination that would make him a star tennis player.

Joy learns not to blame Stan; the siblings learn not to blame their parents for their emotional inadequacies and vulnerabilities. As Savannah heads back home, her in-flight conversations reveal that she has learned nothing of the kind. She hopes maybe her mother figured out a way to escape the locked bedroom door, but if she hasn’t, her mother surely learned “the reality of starvation, a fitting and appropriate ending” (463). The novel never reveals whether Savannah murdered her mother—the point, then, is that Savannah thinks she has. The novel teaches what Savannah refuses to learn: In her bitter and angry heart, her festering hate, her strategy of making her imperfect life endurable only by blaming others, Savannah reveals the danger in the logic of blame. Forgiveness, as Joy decides late in the novel, “comes easier with age” (440).